HOPE is a new workshop
that is intended to bring together researchers interested in the
design, semantics, implementation, and verification of higher-order
effectful programs. It will be informal, consisting of invited
talks, contributed talks on work in progress, and open-ended
discussion sessions. This 1st edition of HOPE is dedicated
to John Reynolds, whose work is an inspiration to us all.

Program

There were 21 talk submissions, of extraordinarily high quality. As
the workshop is only one day long, we were only able to accept 13 of
them for presentation at the workshop. So there will be 13
contributed talks, but no invited talks or other sessions. We expect
this to be a very high-octane workshop!

Goals of the Workshop

A recurring theme in many papers at ICFP, and in the research of many
ICFP attendees, is the interaction of higher-order programming with
various kinds of effects: storage effects, I/O, control effects,
concurrency, etc. While effects are of critical importance in many
applications, they also make it hard to build, maintain, and reason
about one's code. Higher-order languages (both functional and
object-oriented) provide a variety of abstraction mechanisms to help
"tame" or "encapsulate" effects (e.g. monads, ADTs, ownership types,
typestate, first-class events, transactions, Hoare Type Theory,
session types, substructural and region-based type systems), and a
number of different semantic models and verification technologies have
been developed in order to codify and exploit the benefits of this
encapsulation (e.g. bisimulations, step-indexed Kripke logical relations,
higher-order separation logic, game semantics, various modal logics).
But there remain many open problems, and the field is highly active.

The goal of the HOPE workshop is to bring researchers from a variety
of different backgrounds and perspectives together to exchange new and
exciting ideas concerning the design, semantics, implementation, and
verification of higher-order effectful programs.

We want HOPE to be as informal and interactive as possible. The
program will thus involve a combination of invited talks, contributed
talks about work in progress, and open-ended discussion sessions.
There will be no published proceedings, but participants will be
invited to submit working documents, talk slides, etc. to be posted
on this website.

Call for Talk Proposals

We solicit proposals for contributed talks. Proposals should be at
most 2 pages, in either plain text or PDF format, and should specify
how long a talk the speaker wishes to give. By default, contributed
talks will be 30 minutes long, but proposals for shorter or longer
talks will also be considered. Speakers may also submit supplementary
material (e.g. a full paper, talk slides) if they desire, which PC
members are free (but not expected) to read.

We are interested in talks on all topics related to the interaction of
higher-order programming and computational effects. Talks about work
in progress are particularly encouraged. If you have any questions
about the relevance of a particular topic, please contact the PC
chairs at the address hope2012@mpi-sws.org.